Update: I used Firefox 49 with this new configuration in my web-production work earlier today (Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016 — rust never sleeps, and neither do I). Nope. Firefox cannot perform anywhere near as well as Google Chrome. I have about 15 tabs open at any given time, and Firefox can’t really handle it. Chrome can.

Whatever you feel about Google, the Chrome web browser is a towering achievement that makes work on the web possible at a higher level than any other software I’ve used.

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Thursday, Sept. 29, 2016’s post begins here:

Did you (or your computer) upgrade to Firefox 48 or 49? If so, there’s a way to make your trusty non-Google web browser up to 700 percent faster when it comes to rendering pages?

According to the developers, the page rendering gains for Electrolysis-enabled releases of Firefox could exceed over 700%.

But this feature is not turned on by default. Wallen details how to activate Electrolysis on your Firefox installation:

By default Electrolysis is disabled. To enable it, you have to do the following:

Open Firefox

Enter about:config in the address bar

Set browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true

Set extensions.e10sBloc­kedByAddons to false

Set extensions.e10sBloc­ksEnabling to false

Restart Firefox

I would feel much better running Firefox as my daily browser but have gone pretty much 100 percent to Google Chrome in recent years because it’s so damn fast when running multiple tabs. And I run a lot of tabs — between 12 and 20 at a time.

The problem with Chrome is that Google gets a whole lot more out of you in terms of data. A lot more. With the Mozilla-coded Firefox, which is less beholden to Google than ever, you as a user get some important separation from one of the world’s biggest, Big Brotherly web companies.

I am going to set up all of my work-related bookmarks in Firefox and see if I can get through the day without the browser quitting on me.